Benifis a backdrop, or New Year's appeal of Leo Rubinstein

What I am currently composing, and you, dear reader, are currently reading is the so -called New Year's text. And even, we can say, New Year's appeal. Or even a message. No, after all, let it be an appeal-the word “message” pulls along some not very desirable parasitic associations.

In general, appeal. New Year's.

And the conditions and conventions of this thoroughly flooded, but strikingly tenacious genre are such that you do not want, but you need some kind of “results”. Well, it seems to be accepted.

Honestly, I do not like it at all. Not like completely hated "forecasts", but, in general, too. But this time I don’t really want to, but let's try, okay ...

What was it like that?

I will deliberately miss now everything that more or less all of me is talking about without me. Yes, and I myself thought about it, talked, wrote. And about the emergency construction of the temple of zeroing on hemp, and about Belarusian events-simultaneously encouraging and terrifying, and about the epic, Shakespearean scope of stories with poisoning and subsequent crushing exposure, and about our ardent indifferent legislations, which with gloomy wild boar are trying to prohibit people with difficulty with difficulty looking for all the same. A negligent oversight is still not prohibited.

We did not get out all year and these days we still continue not to get out of the sensational “summons” and “information farms”, replacing each other with such a sprint swiftness that we did not have time not to somehow realize them, but even to close their mouths lifted with amazement-so with open mouths and sit, like on the lambs, on our underlying parts of our own bodies "Rights".

But behind all the events, behind all the scenes and all the mise -en -scenes, not frail and on their own, the backdrop, distorting, deforming, then curving, then, on the contrary, straightening everything that was happening against his inevitable painful background.

He was the main thing in this view. He burned with an unbearable light and pounded in his eyes like a light bulb in a prison cell. He dictated and steamed. He endowed with meaning one thing and made it like another. He, as is characteristic of destructive storms, typhoons and tornadoes, wore a delicate, slightly opera female name, the name “Pandemia”.

Events events, but it was he, the backdrop, von, became the main character of the whole drama. It was, of course, his benefit.

It was a year of completely new, completely unpredictable, completely unique experience. Experience, which, within the framework of the general biography of two or three generations, did not find an analogue. It was too visible a lesson, already, in general, the obvious fact that all meaningful forecasts and insightful predictions were a muffled price.

It was a year of anxiety - for relatives, for friends, for themselves.

This was a year of not always voluntary spiritual and intellectual experiments aimed not so much at creative breakthroughs as at the most vulgar self -preservation.

It was a year of endless losses. Such, of course, every year. But this one, which has passed, in the density of human losses, is comparable only over the years of wars or over the years of mass state terror.

But our generation is known to our generation only from the stories of senior, in fiction, in memoirs, in cinema. Therefore, we constantly “remembered” what we could not remember ourselves. They remembered funerals, bombing and bomb shelters, a photography, about the noise of a night engine in a lobby yard, about a lift door sharply in nightly silence, about night whispers: “This is for who?”

Who did this filthy soulless infection come for today? Who will she come for tomorrow?

Mom said that when the news came about someone’s death during the war, it seemed wild and strange that people in those days could die from something “civilian”, and not died at the front or under bombing. So here.

An amazing year, to say. So much amazing that I only hear around me: "When it is already over, this damned year!" And the truth is the damned! And the truth is when already!

And still, and still, and still!

And still, something is funny for us and from something fun. We are alive, and hardly we need to be shy.

We do not have the right to be friends to rejoice, especially - life's little things.

When I hear, read or see that someone was born to someone, someone was cured of heavy ailments, someone published a book, someone composed a pretty story or painted a funny picture, someone showed a photograph of a laughing child, someone showed how two bits were attached outside, someone demonstrated a thick heated cat, who had a sleeping pillows, someone said that he had or from him or from him or from him or from him. It is not clear why a good mood and I want to sing, I think that in our times this is all together and each individually must be carefully folded in a special, waterproof and non -combustible box and carefully store it in a secluded and reliable place, opening it from time to time, looking at these jewelry and dreamily sighing with a blessed and slightly dull smile on the face.

New Year's days with their involuntary increased excitability and some, stretching from the depths of childhood, nervous impatience have the ability to pull out some random episodes, sensations, smells, sounds from the memory. And not only to pull them out of memory, but also inevitable to endow them not always characteristic of their significance, secret meanings and not without reason to suspect them of involvement in the world of miracles.

They say that nothing is fundamentally new, and in general nothing new in history, or in art, nor in a private biography.

This is so and not so.

Those who say that nothing new happens, they say no less often that nothing is ever repeated literally. That all comparisons and parallels, especially historical ones, are in some ways similar to each other, sometimes to literal coincidences, and in some ways-not at all.

So exactly the same thing that phenomena or events are not similar to each other, are not similar to each other, different from each other - this is new.

And each subsequent year is necessarily new. His novelty is especially acute when he has not yet come, but on the way, when we only know about this advancing year that he is new, and in which, in fact, his novelty, we do not know and we cannot know.

And we can only hope.

A very strong, although for some reason a slightly shameful feeling is a feeling of hope. Although no, not shameful, more precisely it will be said - bashful. And it is bashful because she, this hope, pops up from the muddy abundance of despondency or despair every time again and again, contrary to the logic of events and generally common sense.

However, in my opinion, which is why she, hope, has a chance of success. Once at the height of some kind of dispute, I don’t remember at all what, and it doesn’t matter, ”I said with my friend in polemic excitement something like your, they say, arguments, are too indisputable so that they can be mistaken for true.

Something similar sometimes I want to repeat now.

On the eve of that seemingly insignificant and purely household procedure, when the old calendar is removed from the wall in the hallway, and new concepts as “new” and “hope” are hung in its place, become universally recognized synonyms.

So with new hopes and with new happy expectations of us all! And let them only try not to make excuses!